


the one where Tony is not a therapist

by pure1magination



Series: Stony drabbles [2]
Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Depressed Steve Rogers, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Tony Stark-centric, Tony does not know how to emotions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-03
Updated: 2016-08-03
Packaged: 2018-07-29 03:39:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,290
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7668670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pure1magination/pseuds/pure1magination
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve is very mopey, and for some ungodly reason, Natasha thinks Tony is the one who can fix it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the one where Tony is not a therapist

**Author's Note:**

> rated Teen for themes of depression and mentions of suicidal thoughts

Tony paused mid-step with his coffee in one hand. “Um. Did I miss an invitation?” 

Four members of The Avengers stood before him, in full battle gear. Bruce scratched the back of his head guiltily and averted his eyes. 

Natasha stepped forward. “It’s a  _ stealth  _ mission, Tony. Fury thought it would be better if you and Captain Rogers didn’t go.”

“So  _ he _ gets to go?” Tony pointed at Bruce. “The big green rage monster in purple amazingly-spandex pants gets to go, but I don’t?”

Bruce pushed up his glasses. “I’m going to be more behind-the-scenes, actually…”

Tony gestured widely, spilling some coffee. “Why can’t  _ I  _ be behind-the-scenes!”

“Because,” Natasha said firmly, “we can only take a few people. We only need one behind-the-scenes guy, and we need to stay serious, and focused. Banner is the best match for that.”

Tony scoffed in disbelief. “I can be serious!”

“Good.” Natasha tilted her head slightly in the direction of the living room. “Go be serious. He needs it.”

“What?! No!” Tony went to cross his arms and remembered he was holding the coffee. He gulped that down and  _ then  _ crossed his arms. “Captain Sulky over there is serious enough for the six of us.”

“You know,” Clint said, a little dodgy because he, too, hated confrontation, “Not that it’s any of my business, but. He has been  _ extra  _ sulky lately.”

“He has,” Natasha agreed. “And distracted, which is the real reason Fury doesn’t want him on this mission.”

“So, what, you’re leaving  _ me  _ to talk to him?” Tony’s hand splayed across his arc reactor.

“I’m not.” Natasha punched the button on the elevator. “Fury is.”

The elevator arrived. Tony shouted protests after them, pleaded with Natasha one more time to let him come with them, even offered her ice cream, but Natasha ignored him, and the elevator doors shut behind his team. 

Tony turned around with a heavy sigh. He eyed his empty coffee cup, and the stain on the floor which one of his ‘bots was happily swabbing with a sponge and some lemon-scented cleaner. Tony stepped around the ‘bot and served himself more coffee. He was going to need approximately a metric shitton of coffee in order to deal with Captain Mopey.

Two chugged cups of coffee later, Tony stopped just short of the door to the living room. His fingers flexed near the doorknob, as though to grab it, but retreated back into a fist. He ran over Natasha’s words in his head. It wasn’t as though talking to Captain Sadface was an actual  _ mission. _ The order hadn’t directly come from Fury. There would probably be no negative repercussions whatsoever if Tony just turned the other way and went to his lab.

Tony turned the other way and went to his lab.

He breathed in the familiar scent of paint, oil, and various metals coated in lubricant. His laboratory welcomed him with an endless stretch of projects and possibilities. Tony cranked up the AC/DC, tugged on some goggles, fired up a blowtorch, and got to work.

Five hours later, he realized his stomach was rumbling because he’d forgotten to eat for the past… yikes. He realized what time it was and headed upstairs.

He popped his head in the living room. “Hey, I’m ordering pizza. Or maybe Chinese. What’re you in the mood for?”

Captain Moodypants raised those big blue eyes slowly to look up at him. His chin was propped on one hand, the room was relatively dark, and there was a pile of what appeared to be used tissues on the couch. Tony was about to be surprised about this and make some sort of joke about how he didn’t figure Cap to be the kind of guy to get his jollies on a public couch, but the red rims around the Captain’s puffy eyes stopped him short. There was a gravity to the air around him that had Tony wondering if sadness could actually affect the properties of the molecules around him. “...Whatever you want is fine,” Cap said, and those blue eyes sank down like a rock to stare at a spot on the floor. His magnificent adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed.

“O...kay then. Guess we’re having curried lamb brain, grasshopper tacos, and fois gras ice cream! J.A.R.V.I.S.!”

“Yes, sir?” The A.I. sounded disgusted.

“You heard the order. Cap said he wants it.”

Captain DramaQueen sighed heavily- so heavily that Tony wondered about the air thing again- and said, “Never mind. I didn’t want food anyway.”

Tony stared at him for several seconds. “...J.A.R.V.I.S., order pizza.” Tony ignored the A.I.’s affirmative response in favor of turning the lights all the way up and crossing the room. Captain Sadpants squinted like DiCaprio and hid his face. 

“Okay, light-vampire. You’ve depleted my tissue supply enough. What are you doing, hogging my living room and jerking off in the dark anyway? I didn’t figure that was your thing.”

The masturbation joke he’d decided not to tell earlier didn’t have the desired effect. Instead of snapping at him, Cap just gathered up the tissues all stiff-jawed and apologized. Then he stood up to leave.

“Wait!” Tony reached for one of Cap’s massive shoulders- and  _ wow  _ how did Tony always forget just how  _ large  _ this man was? He was almost as big as Thor! And damn, that ratio. 

Cap was staring at him questioningly.

Right. “Is pizza okay?” he blurted.

“...Pizza is fine, Tony.” Cap went to turn around again.

“-You don’t have to leave!”

Cap paused. “You said it yourself. I’m hogging your living room.”

“You could hog it  _ with  _ me. In case you haven’t noticed, we’re the only two here.”

Cap arched an eyebrow. He met Tony’s eyes long enough that Tony started to feel uncomfortable. Then, eyebrow resting in its natural place once more, those golden brows edged a little closer over the bridge of that mountainous nose. “Are you hitting on me?”

Tony blinked. “Uh. No, not that time. Unless you  _ wanted  _ me to?”

One of those sad-smiles flickered across Cap’s face, leaving him even more tragic-looking than before. “...Thought you were making a joke.” Cap turned around again and made to leave the room.

Tony followed him out. 

Cap threw the enormous handful of tissues into the nearest garbage can. Then, he paused and looked over his shoulder at Tony. 

Tony wondered again about the air thing. Seriously, was it possible to scientifically measure whether the air around a sad person really was heavier than the other air in the room? 

“Do you need something?” Cap asked in a voice that said he’d do whatever someone needed him to do, even if he’d rather not.

“Uh. No.”

Cap resumed his heavy pace towards wherever-he-was-going. Tony followed.

Cap paused again. “You’re following me,” he said without looking.

“Yup.”

Cap waited for an explanation, but finding none forthcoming, he sighed, and continued moving forward. And Tony kept following him.

Cap paused in front of his bedroom door. He raised an eyebrow. 

Tony stared at him. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know what was wrong. He didn’t know how to fix this. He really hoped it wasn’t anything he’d done, personally, because he was shit at apologizing. He always ended up trying too hard, going over the top, and messing something up. He really just wanted Cap to be okay. But he didn’t know how to make that happen. And not knowing something was the worst itch a scientific brain could possibly have. 

“Did you want something?” Cap’s deep timbre was asking, and oh. Cap was looking at him.

‘I want you to be okay’ was not an acceptable answer. “Nah. Just lonely.”

He regretted those words immediately, because they seemed to make Cap ten times sadder.

Cap did a sad half-smile thing. “Come on in.” He held open the door of his bedroom, like a true gentleman.

Tony awkwardly rushed inside. He’d designed this bedroom, so he knew exactly what it looked like, but he seriously needed to research that air thing, because as impossible and impractical and against-all-the-laws-of-physics as it sounded, the air in this room was seriously dense. He felt like he’d just gained fifty pounds. Cap had let the gravity pull him down onto the edge of his bed, where he was sitting, slumped, and looking at the ground. “Sorry there’s not much for entertainment,” he apologized. “I don’t come in here much, unless I want to sleep.”

“Oh. Were you going to sleep?”

“...No.”

“Okay then. Um… Do you have cards or something? We could play Go Fish. Or poker, or euchre, or, anything I guess. If there aren’t enough of us, J.A.R.V.I.S. has programmed standbys. He can fill in. I wouldn’t bet against him, though. I swear he cheats.”

“I do only what you programmed me to do, sir.” J.A.R.V.I.S. responded overhead.

“He’s a goddamned cheater.” Tony bounced on his toes. He considered sitting down somewhere, but the only places to sit down were the floor, and the bed, and the floor was uncomfortable, and the bed was. Well.

Cap had reached into a drawer and produced a deck of cards that looked approximately old as balls. “I have these,” he said.

“Great! What do you play.” Tony pulled out some of the cards and looked at them. The art was beautiful! They really didn’t make cards like these anymore.

“Whatever you want,” said the apparently detached and very apathetic Captain Moodypants.

“Go Fish it is!” Tony plopped himself on the bed because, fuck it, it was more comfortable than the floor. The electric pulse in his pants was just going to have to deal with the fact that he and Cap had this  _ entire building to themselves _ and he was  _ in Captain America’s bedroom  _ and  _ sitting on his bed.  _

Tony dealt the cards. “So here’s how it works. You have your cards, and I have my cards. If we have any matches at the beginning- and I do, two 2’s- we put the down somewhere, and once that’s done, we just keep asking each other ‘do you have any 2’s’ or 3’s or whatever until the whole deck is gone, and the game is over. Easy. A three-year-old could do it.”

Cap laid down a pair of jacks and a pair of queens like he was laying them in their graves. He waited, eyes downcast.

“...Okay,” Tony said, “I’ll go first. Do you have any 5’s?”

“Go fish.”

Tony drew a card from the top of the deck. “By the way,” Tony said, “‘Go Fish’ means-”

“I know what it means, Tony.”

“...Great.” Tony added the hand to his deck and waited the seemingly unending few seconds for Cap to ask him if he had any fours.

About halfway through the game, Tony was getting itchy. Cap was going  _ way  _ too slow, his eyelashes were  _ way  _ too unfair, all those gorgeous muscles were hunched over in an almost-unflattering position, and dammit, he was Tony Stark and they were  _ alone  _ and on a  _ bed.  _

He started wondering if he should start up some sort of conversation, but every attempt at that so far (37 and counting) had resulted in monosyllabic answers, tired looks, and heavy sighs. Captain Lung Capacity was really not Mister Conversation today.

“Sir,” J.A.R.V.I.S. interrupted their game like an angel from the heavens, “the pizza is here. I’ve had it delivered to your kitchen, as per usual. Would you like it transported to your current location?”

“Nope. We’ll go get it.” Tony sprang off of the bed and bounced impatiently, waiting.

“...You go ahead.” Cap gathered up his cards and shaped them back into a deck. Every motion seemed to take forever.

“No,” Tony said, annoyed to the point of being stubborn. “Not without you. We’re getting some goddamned pizza, you’re going to get off your star-spangled ass, and then we’re going to play video games. -What? ...Why are you looking at me like that?”

Tony had become very uncomfortable because mid-speech-- just after he’s said ‘not without you,’ to be precise-- Cap had stopped and stared into the distance as though he’d just seen a ghost. The grief-stricken, shocked expression had migrated its way over to Tony, where it rested disconcertingly in the vicinity of his face. “You…” Cap’s voice sounded drier than the Badlands National Park. It cracked, it crumbled. So did his expression. “For a moment there, you sounded just like…” 

Cap cut himself off, did the sad-smile thing, shook his head ruefully, and said “Never mind.”

“O...kay. How about that pizza!” Tony’s guts squirmed. He was getting a bad feeling about this.

“Sure.”

Cap followed Tony to the kitchen, silent every step of the way. The silence was crawling under Tony’s skin and starting an ant farm there. Tony started babbling about anything, everything, just to fill the air. Entire paragraphs of disjointed thought spilled from his lips, even as he crammed them with pizza. He found himself rambling about the  _ weirdest _ things, tangent-hopping to topics he wasn’t even sure how he got to, spouting random facts that he hadn’t had the chance to tell anybody for  _ years,  _ and yet Captain SadEmoji still wasn’t saying anything. He barely even cracked a smile.

Finally, Tony let out a heavy sigh of his own. “Okay, Capsicle. Spill it.”

Cap arched an eyebrow.

Tony raised both of his own. “You have been sulking around my tower and polluting the air with your weirdly heavy attitude even more than usual. I mean, you’ve been moody as fuck since they pulled you from the ice, but seriously? You’ve managed to even go beyond  _ that.  _ Is this just your basic state of being? Are you  _ always  _ a moody asshole? Because let me tell you, if this is your default state of being, I think you have major depressive issues. And that’s not just me talking. The entire  _ team  _ is worried about you. And for some reason, they expect  _ me  _ to fix it. Which, I mean, I  _ am  _ a certified genius at fixing things, but those things are generally more like robots or cars or flying metal suits. Psychology stuff is really more Natasha’s deal. But she wants  _ me  _ to do it. So let’s just do us both a favor, and get this over with. Tell me what’s bothering you.”

Cap was silent for so long, Tony screamed internally and wondered if he’d actually have to repeat himself. But then, to Tony’s simultaneous relief and dismay, Cap did the sad-smile thing, averted his eyes, and said “You wouldn’t understand.”

Tony’s internal screaming cranked up to ten. “Try me.”

Cap was silent for an uncomfortably long time again. He considered Tony, sighed, crossed those massive arms. He arched an eyebrow. He seemed to be trying to gauge whether or not Tony was kidding. When he was met only with the most sincere expression that Tony could muster, Cap seemed to come to an agreement with himself. He averted his gaze again. “Is there anything that you regret?”

Tony snorted. “I don’t  _ do  _ regret. I get drunk, I do whatever I want, and in the morning, it all gets swept under the rug, and I can do whatever I want again.”

Cap’s expression was somewhere between disillusioned and annoyed. He moved to stand up.

Tony reached out to grab his wrist. His fingers closed around warm skin.

Their eyes met.

Tony apologized with his eyes, but quickly moved on. “Is that what’s bothering you? You did something you feel guilty for?”

“...It’s not that simple.” 

“Okay,” Tony said, unable to keep the impatience out of his voice anymore, “so what  _ do  _ you regret?”

Cap sighed. He  opened his mouth, then shut it again. He appeared rueful. He opened his mouth again. “Being alive,” he said.

Well, that hit Tony like a slap across the face. He sat there, stunned. He was  _ way  _ out of his depth.

Cap seemed to feel guilty for causing this expression. “It’s… survivor’s guilt, Natasha told me. She said… that awful, gnawing feeling I get when I think about how everyone I cared about is gone, and I’m still alive… that… weird mixture of relief and pain, whenever I go see Peggy… it’s all because I feel guilty that I’m still young, and everyone I ever know is either very old, or very dead.”

Tony blinked. He had no idea what to say.

Cap did the sad-smile thing. “Sometimes, I regret crashing that plane into the ocean. And it… I feel bad about it, because I don’t regret saving all those people. I did the right thing. But… sometimes I think about what would have happened if I hadn’t.” He swallowed. His throat bobbed. He sad-smiled and shook his head, almost-laughed. “Sometimes I wish I’d gone down with the plane.”

“But you did.” 

Those stormy-blue eyes met his. Years of pain and anguish swirled behind them like marbles. 

“...Oh.” Tony swallowed. “You’re saying…”

Cap looked away.

“J.A.R.V.I.S.!” Tony called. “Do we have any beer? -Do you drink beer? -I want some beer. J.A.R.V.I.S. do we have beer?”

“In your private cooler, sir.”

This time, it was Caps’ hand that halted Tony’s wrist as Tony tried to stand. Tony ignored the electric jolt of heat from Cap’s fingertips.

“I can’t get drunk.” Cap sad-smiled. “I tried.”

“Fuck.” Tony pushed his hair back. “I can’t handle this sober.”

“Sorry for unloading on you.” Cap released Tony’s wrist. 

“No, no! I asked for it. I just…  _ Shit,  _ you’re  _ suicidal?  _ I am  _ really _ not qualified for this.”

“Not… suicidal. Just…” Cap let the pause linger. “...Lonely.”

“But you have  _ us  _ now,” Tony pointed out.

Cap sad-smiled. “It’s not the same.”

Tony was beyond uncomfortable with this conversation and  _ really  _ just wanted Cap to stop moping. “Okay. No. It’s not the same. It’s 2013, not 1943. We have the internet now, instead of polio and asthma cigarettes and whatever-the-fuck-else you guys had. We have  _ television.  _ We have  _ cell phones.  _ We have decades of knowledge, at our fingertips, and we can listen to whatever music we want  _ when _ ever we want. Which I know is not the same as time-travel, but still. Do you  _ really _ want to go back to 1945? Or do you want to move on and live in the present with the rest of us? Because really, this depressed Grandpa act is getting annoying.”

“I never said I wanted to go back.” 

Tony gestured widely with his hands, exasperated. “Isn’t that what you want though?! You miss your friends. You miss Peggy, and Binky, and whatever-”

“His name is Bucky.”

“-Whatever! You miss them, and you want to go back, but you  _ can’t.  _ Time-travel is science  _ fiction.  _ It will never be possible. I know; I’ve looked into it. What scientific supergenius  _ hasn’t  _ looked into it? -but because of quantum mechanics, and the fabric of spacetime, and general energy specifications, and the way subatomic particles  _ work,  _ it just isn’t possible, it never will be, so stop sitting around and hoping that someone will find a way to send you back, and just  _ live in the present!” _

Cap’s jaw had gone locked and his eyes had gone steely and he did not look at all consoled.

Tony went on, because he was really on a roll here. “You know what? You’re being selfish as  _ fuck.  _ Do you have  _ any  _ idea what it was like living with the man who created you? He wouldn’t shut up about you! It was always ‘Steve this’ and ‘Steve that’ and ‘have I mentioned how great Steve Rogers is today, because goddamn, is Steve Rogers really great!’ If he wasn’t married to my mom, I’d swear he had a gigantic boner for you. In fact, I’m not sure marriage really stopped him from having a giant boner for you.

“My dad searched the ocean for  _ years  _ trying to find you. And once they did finally defrost your sorry ass, what do you do? You have been nothing but frustrating, and ungrateful, and stubborn since the moment you woke up. Talk about a disappointment. I heard all these great things about you- Coulson fucking  _ worshipped  _ you, you know that, right? -You’re a living  _ legend.  _ How the fuck was I ever supposed to measure up to that? Nothing I did was ever enough to impress my father, because I wasn’t  _ you.  _ And  _ look  _ at who you are. Mopey, sulky, dressing in thrift store clothes meant for someone five times your age- and don’t even  _ start  _ with me on the 90-something crap, because for one, that’s  _ my  _ joke, and for two, you’re technically not even 90 because your aging process was frozen along with you for seventy years.

“Yeah, so okay, you’re pretty good on the battlefield, and there’s something so unshakeably  _ wholesome  _ about you that being an ass just to get a reaction is one of my favorite pastimes, and yeah, there’s something about you that’s just so annoyingly  _ perfect  _ that everyone just fucking  _ loves  _ you, even when you  _ are  _ being moody and unreasonable, and, yeah, you are pretty much a paragon of human physical fitness, and you have that baby-blue eyes thing going for you; you can just give people this doe-eyed look with those fucking Bambi eyes of yours and they’re just thrown completely off-guard and fall victim to pretty much anything you say, and, yeah, your hair is… I’ve… lost track of what I was saying. But the point is! Stop… being… sad.”

“...You think I’m perfect?” is of course what came out of that snarky fucking mouth.

“Have you  _ seen  _ you?” came the brilliant response.

That snarky mouth curled up in amusement. “As a matter of fact, I  _ do  _ have a mirror.”

“Good. You should use it sometime.”

The eyebrow went up. “How do you think I style my hair?”

“With old man magic and a can of goo. -Wait, is. Is that a  _ smile, _ Captain?”

“I didn’t realize I meant so much to you.”

“Wh- okay, I said you’re important to  _ everybody.  _ Did you miss that part?”

Captain Handsome was edging closer- and okay, edging was a  _ really  _ bad word to be thinking about when Tony could almost feel his body heat, because if Captain Unfairly Handsome kept smoldering at him like that, Tony was going to have a  _ serious  _ problem in his pants. 

“You’ve looked into time-travel for me?”

“Okay, one,” Tony counted off on his fingers, “I did it for  _ me,  _ because I wanted to see if I  _ could,  _ and  _ two,  _ if I  _ had  _ figured it out, it may or may not have been out of annoyance.”

“Oh?” The eyebrow went up again. His arms had bracketed around Tony.

_ Way  _ too warm in here. Tony needed to order J.A.R.V.I.S. to turn down the thermostat. “Yeah, did you miss the part where your Depressed Grandpa act was super annoying?”

“And what was that about… having a  _ boner  _ for me?”

And oh god, Captain America’s thigh was between Tony’s thighs. Tony did not even know he was capable of riding such a roller coaster in like two minutes, but here we are.

“I…” Tony licked his lips. “You’re…”

“Do you know what would  _ really  _ cheer me up, Tony?” Steve said, very close to his ear. That thigh was  _ almost  _ touching his crotch.

Tony’s heart raced. “What?” he asked breathlessly.

And just like that, the roller coaster was over. Cap brought his head down to touch Tony’s shoulder. His hands slid down against the wall until they were waist-level. “Just… knowing that someone cares.”

Tony didn’t even know what his emotions were doing anymore. Really, it was a wonder he’d held out  _ this  _ far. “We all care about you. I think we’ve pretty firmly established that.”

Steve pulled away. He sad-smiled. “Thanks, Tony.”

“No problem.” He had no idea what had just happened. Super genius he may be, but  _ not  _ with emotions. “So… what was that? Just now?” His eyes darted over the Captain’s face. “-Did we just almost make out?”

The eyebrow went up. “Did you want to?”

“I wouldn’t say no to it.”

“Well, in  _ that  _ case…” Steve dipped lower and brought his face closer and closer, and Tony really honest-to-Bill Nye thought he was going to kiss him.

Half a breath away, they were interrupted by a smirking Natasha. “Well, isn’t  _ this  _ cozy.”

Steve jumped away, covered his mouth, and turned bright pink.

Tony was left suddenly cold against the wall, mouth agape, panting for breath, with a very obvious bulge in his pants.

“Aw,” Natasha drawled in a parody of disappointment. “Did I interrupt something?”

“No!” Steve shook his head vehemently. He smoothed back his hair, hastily planted his hands on his hips, and averted his eyes. “No, we were just. Talking.”

“Oh, good.” Natasha slinked into the kitchen and planted herself comfortably on a chair, helping herself to the abandoned pizza. “I’d  _ hate  _ to think I’d walked in on anything important.”

“Oo boy! Is that pizza?” Clint plopped down next to Natasha and crammed half a slice in his mouth.

“Pizza?!” Thor joined them at the table.

Cap slunk bashfully out of the room.

“Um,” Bruce said, awkwardly making his way into the kitchen, “Is there any reason that Captain America is blushing?”

“Nope. None at all.” Tony had mostly regained his composure and was trying to subtly shoot death glares at Natasha. 

Natasha ate pizza, immune. “You know,” she said off-handedly, “You  _ could  _ go after him. Find out what’s wrong,” she suggested loosely.

“I think I’ve had enough of that for today.”

**Author's Note:**

> This was written mostly for personal therapy, so if the characters seem slightly OOC, my apologies.


End file.
